B.C. lands Grey Cup bash after potential hosts 'fumble' ball

Cam Cole, Vancouver Sun columnist03.08.2013

Andrew Harris of the B.C. Lions hoists the Grey Cup in the air after defeating the Winnipeg Blue Bombers 34-23 in the 99th Grey Cup game in Vancouver on Nov.27, 2011. The Grey Cup is returning to Vancouver in 2014, a league source requesting anonymity said Thursday.

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VANCOUVER — On the whole, it’s probably a good thing the Canadian Football League doesn’t carve its choices of Grey Cup host cities in stone.

Presumptive hosts are developing an alarming habit of throwing up their hands and saying: “Not yet!”

Fortunately, the Godfather of the CFL, David Braley, is there to pick up the pieces, and so it will be when a badly kept secret is made official Friday morning, that his B.C. Lions will throw the 2014 Grey Cup bash.

That will make three substantial paydays in four years for the good senator, two of them pickups from the discard pile. He only needs the proceeds from another dozen or so to nearly break even on his outlay over a long career as the CFL’s No. 1 benefactor.

The Lions, you will recall, won the Cup on home turf at BC Place Stadium in 2011 — a game they only hosted because Hamilton’s Ivor Wynne Stadium was finally acknowledged to be in the last stages of decomposition — and Braley’s Toronto Argonauts did the same last November at Rogers Centre, in a 100th-anniversary celebration that broke all records for revenues.

The latest city to drop back and punt is Winnipeg, which had been the front-runner for the 2014 game in its new Investors Group Field. But owing to construction delays, a park that was supposed to have opened last year — while dazzling, by all accounts — won’t get its first test until this summer, and the Blue Bombers appear to have decided that they’d rather play a full season in the new facility and work out the bugs before taking on the big show.

“Only the Bombers could find a way to lose a Grey Cup without playing in it,” wrote one commenter on a Winnipeg story about the day’s developments.

“What is factual is that it is sometimes better for the overall status of the organization when you are dealing with a brand new facility, to work out the kinks and get fully acclimated to the new facility before hosting a major event such as the Grey Cup,” said Bombers spokesperson Darren Cameron. “But financial drawbacks on us possibly hosting in 2014 were not and are not a concern whatsoever. We are in a great financial position to host this event whenever it is appropriate for us to do so.”

Originally, the 2014 Cup had been provisionally awarded to Ottawa after the Jeff Hunt group was granted a franchise in 2008, but it might be 2014 before the team plays a game in its new Lansdowne Park/Frank Clair complex.

So now, the Lions are getting the championship game and festival more or less third-hand, even though (if you’re still following the musical chairs) it would normally have been their turn, anyway, had they not jumped the queue to relieve Hamilton of the 2011 finale.

It will be good for David Braley’s bottom line.

No figures are available from last year’s record-shattering blowout in Toronto, because private owners don’t have to divulge their balance sheets, but one report pegged Braley’s take to be as high as $10 million, after losing $3 million on the Argos during the regular season.

The last time someone other than the Lions/Argos owner played host to a Grey Cup, the Edmonton Eskimos made a $4-million profit from the 2010 week (despite a heavier than normal investment in the festival) — and, according to one source, cleared about $6 million on their previous Cup week in 2002, when they lost a home game to Montreal.

Down the road, the 2015 game likely will go to Winnipeg, because Hunt says he would rather see Ottawa’s fledgling entry — to be named the Red Blacks, unless saner heads prevail — establish itself as a contender before venturing fully into the spotlight. So the, er, Blue Golds will almost certainly inherit that one.

(Note to Mr. Hunt: Voyageurs or Raftsmen, for cripes sake. Red Blacks is like volunteering to be mocked.)

Hamilton, whose 24,000-seat PanAm soccer stadium must be ready in time for the Games in 2015, therefore might be arm-wrestling Ottawa for the 2016 game, the loser getting it the following year, and then it will have been nine years since McMahon Stadium in Calgary had its last shot, and eight for Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium.

Regina having now approved the bones of the deal to build a new stadium, targeted for opening in 2017, to replace the one at Taylor Field (where the Grey Cup will be played this November), that likely puts Flatland’s next opportunity to host in 2022, with Montreal and Toronto filling in the intervening years.

Or at least, that would make sense, if everything went according to plan. But it’s the CFL, and it’s city and regional and provincial governments, and taxpayers and projects that often fall behind schedule.

So while all this is, theoretically, good news for stadium builders and longtime sufferers from frostbitten buns in Regina and Hamilton — heck, even Calgary is due a renovation before its turn comes up — the rotation is only written faintly in pencil at CFL HQ, where an eraser is always handy.

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